Techdirt Comments

Re: Re: Not really

Do you at least see how crazy that is? They only got in trouble because of the apology?

If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that apologizing for your mistakes and shortcomings is a dumb move. Apologizing is not only an acknowledgement that you've fucked up, it's also a billboard inviting everyone to fuck you even harder for your errors. If you choose to double down instead, you can always argue a "good faith" position and there will be people who will offer you unquestioning support for it.

Re: Re: Re:

Oh in my mind possession of pot is a minor thing, but it was still in violation of the law.

Both sides violated the law, and what the cops did was way worse but if I expect them to live up to the law, I need to see the law applied equally.

Playing major and minor only creates another loophole for cops to slip through. Look at the PlayPen case where some Judges haven't kicked the cases out, instead saying the overreach that far exceeded the law wasn't a major violation of the accused rights.

While the zero-sum game mindset shouldn't always be embraced, with law it needs to be.

We've seen Brady violations skipped over by courts even when the hidden material shows an innocent was jailed. Law makers then pass laws trying to cap any possible restitution to someone railroaded into jail.Yet no one wants to strengthen punishments for Brady violations & naming and shaming the lawyers who do it.

Yes I think it is stupid to get a ticket for not crossing at the corner, but if thats the price I have to pay so a Judge doesn't try to allow a case to continue because it wasn't a real bad violation of the accused rights... gimme the ticket.

Re: Re:

If the FBI ran similar campaigns to pick the most troubled people from any other millions deep group and trick them into attacks and crimes, you would very likely see similar stats for the number of people who would take the bait.

So you're saying that they could just as easily coerce just as many Jews or Christians into committing terrorist attacks?

This is not to say that there isn't an issue with people's islamic beliefs being manipulated, only that this isn't the only way to manipulate people.

Here's my problem; The multiculturalism crowd would like you to believe that all Muslims fall into one of two categories:

The peaceful non-violent Muslim who loves everyone and would never dream of harming a single living creature. They've lived in a western country almost their entire lives and may even have been born there. These are the people we should welcome with open arms and who we should never, ever be suspicious of.

The extreme, radical Muslim who thinks of nothing but killing infidels 24/7. They have been a terrorist almost their entire life and obviously snuck into the country covertly. These are the people who are super easy to find because they spew nothing but hate and the authorities probably already know about them.

Yet when someone carries out a relatively small-scale attack, like the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the guy who drove a truck through a crowd of people in France, or the guy who attacked people with an axe on a train in Germany, which group do they almost always come from?

Why are there so many videos of Muslims from group #1 harassing people on the streets of other countries, chanting "U.S.A. go to Hell!", praising Osama Bin Laden, destroying Christmas trees, etc? Why is it that all it takes to turn a percentage of group #1 into members of group #2 is to do something they find offensive, like burn a Koran or draw a cartoon of Mohammad?

It's not politically correct to say this, but while any individual Muslim might be a great person, Muslims as a whole are a rather volatile group who live their lives according to a doctrine that is often used to preach hate toward non-Muslims.

The Congress Woman is more in tune with the times than you think

I agree, she's badly confused about the Internet and net neutrality. But her logic is in total congruence with the plans and preferences of ISPs given the likelihood net neutrality rules will be rolled back by the FCC under the Trump Administration.

First, the big-market ISPs will expand the prioritization of their own content, which they're already doing, in effect, with zero rating, data caps and the edge providers they've been buying up.

Second, they'll establish fee schedules for edge providers to access their networks. ISPs will operate their networks like cable providers and if major edge providers fail to pay up, they'll be blocked until they do.

And to the point of the article, consumer and politicians can be expected to pressure ISPs to block objectionable and extreme content and they will respond to these pressures. Because these 'last mile' networks will be owned and operated without net neutrality's level-playing-field rules, ISPs will claim that their First Amendment rights allow them to make editorial decisions.

The 'Fake News' sites of the day will get axed. And plenty of small businesses, non profits and personal blogs will wither on the vine as they get shunted to the slow lanes and face new sets of access fees from multiple ISPs.

The open internet is about to close unless a lot of us do something about it.

Sumer is icumen in

"Terrorist" has become a catch-all term for "anything that triggers Silicon Valley leftists in their safe space." Witness the massive backlash against Breitbart as being a "neo-Nazi" website despite being founded by a Jewish guy in Israel and employing numerous minorities -- including their resident celebrity Milo Yiannopoulos, perhaps the best example of "intersectionality" (a gay Jewish man of mixed ethnicity) who uses his status masterfully to expose the intolerant hypocrisy of the supposed good guys in the opposing party.

Twitter went so far as to shadowban Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, for the unforgivable hate speech of writing a trollish blog about Trump and the ego-driven illogic of liberals that is so atrocious it makes the pointy-headed boss look like an utter genius. This after the "Milogate" controversy where Breitbart's aforementioned insult comic got the banhammer for insulting a black actress from the widely-panned feminist Ghostbusters reboot despite she herself having said some less than PC things in her own Twitter history.

Now Facebook, Google and the like, pretending to be the Allied Powers uniting against the evils of fascism, have initiated a de facto war on whatever their neoliberal paymasters and a committee of their talentless affirmative-action employees have labeled "fake news" and/or "terrorist" content. Such as the trailer for a young woman's documentary film about the shrill hysteria of the male-bashing third-wave feminist movement that has intentionally (and sadistically, with revenge-filled glee) obliterated the legitimate concerns of men. Or negative reviews of Hollywood remake films being spat out for no other reason than a cheap and easy answer to fill mandatory diversity quotas self-imposed by the studios so as to maintain their liberal cred. Lectures by a Canadian university professor who dared challenge the scientifically invalid political consensus on "gender identities," who is himself being investigated (or should I say, persecuted) by the estrogen-laden Inquisitors employed by the tyrannical brat of a PM. And so on.

This isn't about ISIS or self-radicalized Islamists, because Twitter themselves (who, it should be noted, have a Saudi prince on their board of shareholders) have banned or otherwise placed sanctions on users -- including ex-Muslims and moderate reformists like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- for being critical of not only Islamic doctrine but of the irrational left's insistence on shutting down their criticism as "hate speech."

No, this is about doubling down on the incoherent and arguably dangerous narrative that got Trump elected in the first place and will, if it continues, see him elected to a second term. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, isn't that the phrase we're always treated to by the left? Well, now two can play at that game and the real fake news outlets don't like it.

They can only ban so many people from their safe space before they turn into an empty echo chamber like Reddit. Enjoy the next dotcom bubble, guys, because when it bursts, it'll be beautiful and it'll be yuuuge.

In most of this asset forfeiture cases, the person usually allowed the cops to take the cash so that they could be on their way rather than getting arrested.

My question is; If the person with the cash refuses to allow it to be taken and the cops end up arresting them, does that in any way make it harder for the authorities to try and confiscate the cash? Does the cash then become evidence while they try to find a way to justify their seizure of it? Or can they just as easily file forfeiture proceedings against the cash, leading to the person losing their money **and** having to deal with bogus charges?

I understand that very few people want the enormous hassle and stigma of getting arrested, I'm just wondering if a person *was* willing to deal with all that, would it be a way to stop the cash grab by the cops? It seems to me that they would have a much more difficult time arguing a charge of obstruction when the only "obstruction" that occurred was not letting the cops steal the cash.

It's not about persecuting the Jews. It's about their continual illegal mistreatment of the Palestinians that landed all of Europe in a massive war when an Austrian guy did it to the ethnic minorities in Germany, but gets a free pass in Israel because of international oversensitivity to, well, them being the previous victims of tattooed ID numbers on their wrists.

Israel has overdrawn the Holocaust card too many times to get away with justifications for their disgusting behavior and now people are waking up. It's not working anymore, and there's going to be a swift and mighty backlash for their arrogance that will make them rue the day they didn't just go to Madagascar and avoid all these problems in the first place.

The damnable, unconstitutional hypocrisy of the US and EU with their anti-BDS laws and inability to so much as broach the subject of the "special relationship," deserves to be called out just the same. This is a particularly insular and arrogant group of people -- not all of them, just the hypocritical ultra-nationalist paranoids pushing this crap -- who is going to cry "remember the 60 billion" to no avail when, after being thrown out of more than 200 countries over the past five millennia, they get thrown out of "their own." Prior instances of "bullying" are not an excuse to become a bigger bully yourself.

The legal fiction that is the "state of Israel" is a belligerent, unassimilable ethnic enclave, a would-be British colony, and an obsolete relic of WW2 that must be dissolved completely and returned to its persecuted inhabitants, or else face the consequences of the next world war. And this time, nobody in the goy countries is going to take on the poor wailing rabbis aboard the *St. Louis II.* No, not even Canada. AND NOT EVEN GERMANY.